It looks like another flagship phone is going to ditch the headphone jack

HTC probably has a new phone coming. According to noted phone leaker Evan Blass, it’ll be called the
Bolt, and it’ll arrive on Sprint sometime in October. Blass tweeted an apparent press photo of the device
on Wednesday, showing a phone that looks largely similar to the
HTC 10 flagship the Taiwanese manufacturer
launched earlier this year.

Looks pretty good, right? Well, if you’re still snippy about
Apple ditching the headphone jack with the
iPhone 7, you might not want to look too closely at the top or
bottom of the device. Whereas the HTC 10 put a 3.5mm connector on
the top of the phone, the Bolt appears to hold nothing but a lone
USB-C port at its bottom.

Now, if HTC does ditch the jack, it wouldn’t be unprecedented for
Android. Motorola omitted the longtime audio connector with
its Moto Z phone earlier this year.

The issue for devices like these, though, is that the USB-C
headphones market is much less developed than the Lightning
headphones one. The iPhone 7 is massive enough to develop some
sort of market for the latter, but on the Android side, it’s less
clear if the likes of Motorola and HTC can drum up enough
interest to force headphone manufacturers’ hand just yet.

Instead, you’d likely have to go Bluetooth, which has its own set
of oft-repeated issues, or use a dongle, which is a dongle. Either way, if you thought the headphone jack
conundrum was going to end with the iPhone 7, you might want to
think again.